Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Prints

About Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in November 1864 at Albi into one of the oldest aristocratic families in France. Fractures of both thighs at thirteen and fourteen failed to heal properly and his legs stopped growing, which closed off the riding, hunting life of his class and turned him toward drawing. He trained in Paris under Léon Bonnat and then, from 1882, for about five years with Fernand Cormon, and settled in Montmartre, which he rarely left for the next twenty years. Dance halls, cabarets, circuses and brothels were his subjects, and their performers his models: La Goulue, Jane Avril, Aristide Bruant, Yvette Guilbert. His first lithographic poster, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue of 1891, with its flat silhouettes and lettering borrowed from Japanese prints, transformed poster design; At the Moulin Rouge, painted in 1892 and now in Chicago, includes his own small figure in the crowd. He produced some 363 prints and posters alongside hundreds of paintings on cardboard. Drink and illness wore him down, and he died at his mother's house at Malromé in September 1901, aged thirty-six. The posters were designed to read from across a street, which is why they still read from across a room.